Tag Archives: Money

Never been much of a gambler. Other than the occasional lottery ticket when the jackpot hits $500 million – it just isn’t something I am attracted to.

However, being an engineer and tinkerer at heart, who loves learning how things work, I know a bit of how slot machines work, and how they are controlled by the Casino to regulate payouts to maintain the standard house cut. The odd in a casino are set in such a way that the house always maintains a 8-17% cut of all slot machine games. Penny Slots can be as high as 30% In other words the odds of winning are juggled electronically so the house “wins” a steady percentage of the money bet. Meaning about 85% of the money bet goes into “payouts” to the customers. Non-electronic games, Blackjack, Baccarat , Roulette have rules which favor the house winning. Generally if the payout is very high, the chance of winning is very low.

It is bad business not to pay out, as the sight of someone “winning” tends to drive customers to spend more.

A woman in New York who won nearly $43 million from a slot machine in August was sad to see her wins disappear before her eyes almost immediately, WABC reports.

Katrina Bookman hit the jackpot at the Resorts World Casino in August, but when she came back to collect her winnings the next day, a casino representative told her that she hadn’t actually won.

The machine apparently malfunctioned. While Bookman wasn’t able to walk away with the nearly $43 million, the Casino did offer her a steak dinner.

A notice on the slot machines states, “Malfunctions void all pays and plays.” However, Bookman and her attorney Alan Ripka both believe that she should be offered the maximum amount of money an individual can win on the Sphinx slot machine, which is $6,500.

“They win and the house doesn’t want to pay out. To me that’s unfair,” Ripka said. “The machine takes your money when you lose. It ought to pay it when you win.”

The New York State Gaming Commission says Bookman is only entitled to her winnings, or $2.25. Bookman plans to sue the casino.

The machine she used was reportedly removed, fixed, and then put back for use.

The question here is…If the slot is broken – does the Casino compensate those who have lost money on that broken machine?

Back when I owned a government contracting business (Yes, I confess, I was a “Beltway Bandit”), there were a couple of Government agencies around town who were known to be particularly difficult to work for. Either stiffing contractors by exceedingly long payment cycles stretching payment for services often out over 90, 120, and even 180 days, changing project requirements in midstream and then being unwilling to pay the additional costs. And one particular agency whose contracting officers were known to be particularly hostile and difficult to work with. In any business your first priority (besides income) is to pay the people working for you….On time. That means if you contract for a 30 day payment cycle from your client, and you pay your employees weekly, you are out 4 weeks of salaries and expenses before you see the first dime roll in the door. Stretch that out 180 days, and if you have ten people making $50k a year…

That is $250,000 you have to come up with. Which is a hell of a lot of money for a small business.

Now, there are companies which will loan you money against invoices. You have invoiced Client X for $100,000, and they haven’t paid yet, you can borrow $100,000 to cover salaries until thy do. The problem being, you just lost, 3, 5, 8, 10% of what you borrowed as interest – subtracted directly from your bottom line. So let’s say your profit on $100,000 was planned to be $10,000 (Only the big Bandits get to mark up their margins to 30/35% in the Government contracting business, the small contractors are typically held to under 10%)…

You just paid $10,000 to borrow the money – meaning you made nothing. That profit is what allows your business to grow…And hire more people.

So what the businesses started doing is jacking the bids for work, and raising the rates to cover their anticipated losses. What should have been a $500,0000 contract became a $650,000 contract.

Congress finally stepped in and fixed that payment cycle in the mid 90’s, because the irresponsible and sometimes despicable actions of some government employees were driving small businesses out of business. And no, you can’t take them to court. You can’t sue the government unless they agree to be sued, and often such lawsuit is conducted in a special Kangaroo Court which massively favors the government, even when it’s employees have committed fraud.

In Civil Courts in the US, the outcome is determined by which party has the most money. A tool used by scumbags like Donald Trump against small businesses constantly.

I grew up in Atlantic City, son of an Atlantic City firefighter. Like many firefighters, my dad had a side job working construction. When I was old enough, I apprenticed with a few of his friends so I could learn some trade skills over summer break. While neither of us personally did a job for Trump (and I was too young to have worked on them personally), we knew plenty of people who did. People on a job site talk, especially about horror stories with former projects. In all the stories I heard about work at Trump’s casinos, I don’t think I know a single person who received payment in full from Donald Trump without going to court.

The way a Trump project went in the early days of his AC properties was basically this:

The project started out with a tough, competitive bidding war. This was pretty common for casino projects prior to Trump, and everyone competed to be the cheapest and give a fair price. The contractor selected would then negotiate some specific terms. Typically Trump would try to reduce the price a bit more, and push as much of the payment as possible to the end of the contract. In itself, it’s not that unusual. It gives the client leverage when it comes to completing the project on time and at quality. But it puts the contractor in a bad position, as they have to cover payroll and often some materials out of pocket until the final payment comes through.

The job would then proceed. Complaints about delays due to Trump micromanaging things were common. He’d suddenly change suppliers or decide he didn’t like the carpet or drapes or chandeliers after they’d already been installed. So the project would run long and be over budget.

Eventually you’d finish and send off that final invoice. At this point, you’re stretched pretty thin. Your payroll and supply costs were higher than expected and all that cost has been out of pocket, so even with the final lump sum you’re doing a little better than breaking even. You pick up the check and it’s for exactly half what he owes you. You obviously ask for the rest and he makes up some reason for knocking off half what he owes (sometimes those delays he caused) and says if you want the rest you’ll have to sue him for it, but that he’s got a very good legal team and it’ll cost more than he owes you just to get it. You know you could win the suit, but financially you can’t afford a long drawn out legal battle.

Plenty of people have taken him to court. And he stalls. That’s his whole strategy. Just wait until you can’t afford to keep the case up. If you can hold out, you know you’ll win, but by then you’re in bad shape and may default on loans or lose your business. And it’s not just you, it’s the guys on your crew. You owe them their paychecks. You can’t just screw them because Trump screwed you. So most people just took what he was willing to give.

Eventually we got smart. We instituted the Trump Tax. Contractors started padding out their bids by quite a bit, so that even if you didn’t get that final payment you’d at least break even. Trump still thought he was being clever and making those “great deals” he’s always talking about, but in truth he was now getting hosed and losing more money over his dishonesty than he ever saved. Every once in a while someone would break ranks and give Trump a fair price. They’d lose their shirt on the job and learn a lesson.

In the long run, it would have been better for everyone involved if Trump had just played it straight. But he couldn’t help himself. And the people of Atlantic City paid the lion’s share of the price.

Donors bailing out on the Chumph have left his campaign with only $1.3 m in the bank, and when you add in monies from Super Pacs and the Republican Party – Hillary has out-raised him 4-5 to one. Even worse, the Chumph is using his campaign money as a cash cow to feed his flailing business ventures, paying his own companies $1 million a month out of his campaign money.

Revelations that the Chumph campaign has money problems has started a Twitter storm of #TrumpSoPoor.

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Campaign Cash on Hand as of June 1, 2016

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I had posited in a previous piece that Donald Trump is not actually a billionaire, as he loves to claim – and based on the type of business he is in (Real Estate) that any realistic evaluation of his actual net worth (assets minus liabilities) would probably place him in the under $250 million range. Real Estate deals tend to be heavily leveraged. Meaning the “Bank” owns 90% or more. Indeed in Trump’s normal deal he winds up actually owning not much more than his name on the side of the building.For someone willing to take the risk of punitive litigation by Trump – it isn’t very hard to puncture that veil, and get a true picture.

And I should mention that $250 million may be an optimistic figure – based on the rate he now appears to be borrowing money. That indicates a sinking ship…Of his own device.

Now, the press is beginning to go after this issue…And it isn’t going to be pretty.

The GOP nominee is rich. But how rich depends on odd accounting and subjective criteria.

Donald Trump claims a net worth of more than $10 billion and an income of $557 million. But he appears to get there only by overvaluing properties and ignoring his expenses.

POLITICO spoke with more than a dozen financial experts and Trump’s fellow multimillionaires about the presumptive Republican nominee’s financial statement. Their conclusion: The real estate magnate’s bottom line — what he actually puts in his own pocket — could be much lower than he suggests. Some financial analysts said this, and a very low tax rate, is why Trump won’t release his tax returns.

“I know Donald, I’ve known him a long time, and it gets under his skin if you start writing about the reasons he won’t disclose his returns,” said one prominent hedge fund manager who declined to be identified by name so as not to draw Trump’s ire. “You would see that he doesn’t have the money that he claims to have and he’s not paying much of anything in taxes.”

Trump is certainly wealthy. But in a campaign where the New Yorker has portrayed himself as the biggest, the richest, the classiest and the best at everything, disclosing that he is less rich than he lets on could be damaging. And it is a line of attack Democrats are already using and hope to pound away on until November.

The case against Trump’s accounting of his wealth: His businesses apparently generate a lot of revenue but may not put much cash in his pocket; he assigns himself a net worth that is impossible to verify and may be based in part on fantasy; and he is selling assets and increasing debt in ways that suggest a man scrambling for ready cash.

In response to a list of questions for this story, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks emailed: “The report speaks for itself.” If it does, the report does not speak clearly.

The financial disclosure form showed Trump adding fresh debt of at least $50 million, though a campaign news release said Trump is using increased revenue to reduce his debt, which is now at least $315 million and possibly more than $500 million. The disclosure also suggests that Trump sold fund assets to raise as much as $7 million in cash and individual securities to raise up to $9 million more…More Here…

In his signature book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump boasted that when he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City, he persuaded the state attorney general to limit the investigation of his background to six months. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. Trump argued that he was “clean as a whistle”—young enough that he hadn’t had time to get into any sort of trouble. He got the sped-up background check, and eventually got the casino license.

But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning three years earlier, he’d hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. That story eventually came out in a federal investigation, which also concluded that in a construction industry saturated with mob influence, the Trump Plaza apartment building most likely benefited from connections to racketeering. Trump also failed to disclose that he was under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, who wanted to learn how Trump obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan.

Why did Trump get his casino license anyway? Why didn’t investigators look any harder? And how deep did his connections to criminals really go?

These questions ate at me as I wrote about Atlantic City for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and then went more deeply into the issues in a book, Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business. In all, I’ve covered Donald Trump off and on for 27 years, and in that time I’ve encountered multiple threads linking Trump to organized crime. Some of Trump’s unsavory connections have been followed by investigators and substantiated in court; some haven’t. And some of those links have continued until recent years, though when confronted with evidence of such associations, Trump has often claimed a faulty memory. In an April 27 phone call to respond to my questions for this story, Trump told me he did not recall many of the events recounted in this article and they “were a long time ago.” He also said that I had “sometimes been fair, sometimes not” in writing about him, adding “if I don’t like what you write, I’ll sue you.”

I’m not the only one who has picked up signals over the years. Wayne Barrett, author of a 1992 investigative biography of Trump’s real-estate dealings, has tied Trump to mob and mob-connected men.

No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.

This is part of the Donald Trump story that few know. As Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn’t just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present. This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business.

From the public record and published accounts like that one, it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service…Read the Rest of This Damning Information Here…

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A Presidential race i today’s terms costs about $1 billion. Much of that money comes from the uber-rich. When that group bails on a candidate, life in terms of television ads and door-to-door campaigning gets tough. It seems that some of the big money players – the guys whop drop $10 or more million have headed out the door on the Drumph…

The bad news for the Drumph (and good news for the country) is that the presumptive nominee, Hillary already has a strong organization in place. Further – Drumph is worth only a small fraction of the $10 billion he claims, and by evidence released recently has avoided paying any taxes.

Donald Trump may have sealed the peace with the Republican Party and a few of those who once criticized him. Yet his ability to raise $1 billion before November is in doubt, as several powerful donors who have given tens of millions to the GOP over the years refuse to get behind Trump’s presidential candidacy. The New York Timesgot in touch with 50 of the GOP’s largest donors or their representatives and found “a measure of contempt and distrust toward their own party’s nominee that is unheard of in modern presidential politics.” More than a dozen of them flat out refuse to back Trump.

Some of those who are refusing to back Trump will surely come around. Others, however, speak in terms that make it clear they want nothing to do with the real estate mogul and reality television star. “If it is Trump vs. Clinton,” hedge fund manager William Oberndorf said, “I will be voting for Hillary.” He’s hardly alone. “He’s an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogynistic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard,” investor Michael K. Vlock said.

The resistance from the megarich may be a sign that Trump could very well become the first Republican presidential candidate to be outspent by a Democrat in decades. Some, however, are vowing to stand by Trump. One of them is Foster Friess, who sent an email to the Hill on Saturday explaining his reasoning for supporting the presumptive nominee. “I believe that as Republicans continue to unite behind Donald Trump, he’ll become an even better candidate,” he said.

A Washington man has settled a lawsuit with the city of Tukwila after police officers assaulted him following a complaint that he was dancing in an industrial parking lot, reports the Seattle Times.

The city will pay Linson Tara $100,000 to settle a civil-rights lawsuit filed after the officers used Tasers, their fists and then a police dog on him while he was being restrained.

Tara was facing three counts of fourth-degree assault on police officers, but those charges were dropped when dash cam video showed one of the officers holding Tara on the hood of the police cruiser while his partner used a Taser on him.

Tara can then be seen being thrown to the ground with the two cops piled on him as one punched him repeatedly while the other held him down.

During the entire altercation a police dog is heard frantically barking and appears on screen after being released from the cruiser where it proceeds to attack Tara as he is restrained.

One officer can be heard telling Tara, “Put your hands behind your back and I’ll take the dog off.”

Tara was later transported to a local hospital treated for injuries that included dog bites.

In the police report, officers Brent Frank and Mike Boehmer stated that they had been called to the parking lot after receiving a report that Tara was “walking around, yelling and dancing.”

According to the lawsuit, the officers used excessive force, noting that by the time Tara was rolled over he appeared to be unconscious.

The lawsuit also challenged the the city’s policy of allowing police dogs to bite suspects as a “pain compliance” technique.

The department previously found the officers’ use of force, including the deployment of the K-9, to be within their guidelines.